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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Entmoot principle: debate should be conducted at the slowest possible rate (including constraints arising from needing to act in time). Attempts to accelerate past that rate can generally be assumed to be bad faith.

      2 replies 8 retweets 52 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Analogical skepticism principle: Never trust a first-principles conclusion that has not been validated by a good analogy or three, unless you’re doing pure math.

      2 replies 3 retweets 22 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Doubt-and-standards principle: when faced with a competing objective, compromise your outcome standards relative to your objective in proportion to how doubtful you are about the correctness of your thinking.

      2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Trying to capture the essence of a "boneless epistemology" for my mediocrity blogchain. Something something wuwei soft structure.

      2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Bartleby was partly right. A lot of the time, the correct response to things life throws at you is "I would prefer not to". It is the Karate-Kid "crane" of the Boneless Way. There is no defense.

      1 reply 2 retweets 16 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      pic.twitter.com/oRj4fXVtfL

      1 reply 1 retweet 2 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Basically trying to administer myself a flu shot against culture war 2.0 starting up in 2020 (inevitable given the election) that allows me to continue hanging out in the publics instead of succumbing to waldenponding forces.

      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      The mistakes wannabe centrists have been making 2015-19, leading to them getting pwned by one side or the other, is they try to be stiff pillars of what they consider moral rectitude instead of going boneless. Strong views, weakly held = pwnage.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1210266878255325186 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      Replying to @doriantaylor
      Almost the exact opposite. This is 80% the weak opinions strongly held position I characterized as "foxy" and 20% the "weak positions weakly held" I characterized as "weasely" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-weasel/ …
      2 replies 1 retweet 8 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      Previously, on The Boneless Wayhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1209945963609018368 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      Going boneless in conversation is weirdly sustainable unlike the silent treatment or conscious passive aggression. So long as you don’t need the other person for psychological sustenance you can keep it up for a long time without breaking up. Some people keep it up for years.
      Show this thread
      10:44 AM - 26 Dec 2019
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      • Leon Markham mental blanking interval Divia Eden [ピーチ🍑タィム]sachiko koshimizu森
      1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          Andhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1208807177378361344 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Going boneless is such an important life trick. Kids know it instinctively but people forget as they adult-up. Key to mediocrity.
          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1201309682498822144 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Doerism as a personal preference is great, yay Doerism as hustleporn is tolerable. Emotional labor tax to support universe-denters psyche-sustaining self-talk Doerism as a universalist normative philosophy is to be resisted with all the boneless passivity you can conjure
          Show this thread
          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          Looks like I started going down this bunnytrail in Septemberhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1171661679429607425 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Going boneless is a good tactic in many subcritical ideological disagreements
          1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          One of the reasons The Boneless Way is particularly apt as a life posture in 2020 is that we are dealing with environments of hugely concentrated power of all sorts. But power is hard to exercise intelligently at scale without the active cooperation of the powerless.

          1 reply 3 retweets 8 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Power wants docile, intelligent engagement in harmony with its objectives. Eg. clickbait wants you to amplify to your vulnerable friends with an endorsement. Talking points sources would like you to learn, rehearse, and repeat them. Outrage bait seeks harmonic resonance.

          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          The ramrod-stiff principled "centrist" resists in one direction only to be caught unawares on another front and toppled over. But The Boneless Way can resist in any direction without advance warning or visibility.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Think of designing a building. If you know the prevailing wind is going to N --> S, you can design a stiff building that presents a knife-edge NS and looks like a sail EW. It is vulnerable to anomalous EW winds. But a tree-like not-stiff building can handle any wind direction.

          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          This might be what did the IDW in ultimately. It adopted a stiff, anisotropic resistance posture against a wind from one direction and made itself highly vulnerable to winds from other directions.

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          The first 2 principles in this thread are not quite boneless, since they are meant to counterprogram specific tactics (weaponized "debate" and appeals to first-principles "wonk logic") and therefore exhibit some ideological anisotropy. But they are at least energy-damping.

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          There are risks to the boneless way. Recall in the case of the Ents joining the war in LOTR, they only cut short extended slow debate and acted after seeing a bunch of forest already destroyed. Still, when a real-urgency time constraint became evident, they did act to speed up.

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          One of the risk-management disciplines in applying the boneless way is learning to tell real urgency emerging from a situation apart from false urgency (or lack of urgency) created by an adversary attempting to alter your tempo of deliberation/action.

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Two kinds of errors: type A: believing false urgency manufactured by an adversary is real, and type B: believing real urgency is false and manufactured by an adversary. The boneless way btw, is to not try to correct anyone's urgency errors except your own.

          2 replies 3 retweets 8 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Upon googling, I find I've cited Bartleby in the domestic cozy blogchain rather than mediocratopia one. There's an intersection here. Domestic cozy bonelessness is retreat based and tends to cede agency. Strategic mediocrity bonelessness tends to protect and preserve agency.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Hmm. Wonder if this is worth writing up as a stand-alone blog post outside the blogchain matrix.

          2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          If I had to distill this into a single principle it would be this: be very suspicious of anyone who wants you to spend energy without paying you. Even if you don't care about getting paid. When wealth and power are concentrated, human energy is the default currency.

          3 replies 2 retweets 16 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          Recall that currency serves 3 classical purposes: medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account. When it gets too concentrated, and accounting retreats to high-trust networks, something else has to step in for transactional uses among relative strangers. Solution: energy.

          1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          In nature, we find energy conservation as a general principle of emergent organism design, but that's not what we're talking about here. This is energy defense. Take "battery", "inductor" and "capacitor" aspects of your psyche offline. Only your "resistor" side has a public API

          1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 26 Dec 2019
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          This partitioning I think is very hard for a lot of people, which is why they go entirely offline (waldenponding). I like to take my energy circuits offline, but that doesn't mean I'm in low-energy conservation mode. It just means it's not available by default to others.

          0 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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        20. End of conversation

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